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On Monday, the Obama administration, along with most of the higher-education and business establishment, weighed in with amicus briefs in support of racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin. Given Barack Obama’s mixed messages on affirmative action in the past—he has said his own daughters do not deserve a leg up in admissions and that he understands the resentment toward preferences by whites who do not feel particularly privileged—there was a modest hope that he would break with longstanding Democratic Party orthodoxy to promote a better kind of affirmative action that looks at gaping economic inequalities in our country rather than just counting skin color. He blinked, however, and filed a brief that is unlikely to do anything to change the minds of Supreme Court justices and may do real damage to the president’s own re-election chances.

The administration’…

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When I last wrote about the proposed closure of the University of Missouri Press on June 4, the story had recently broken and I had little, and as it turns out incomplete, information. My central point in that post was simply that the closing of a flagship university’s press, were it actually to happen, would mark a paradigm shift in American universities. However skeptical one might be about academic scholarship as the best way of disseminating knowledge, that is our current system; most importantly, it is the centerpiece of our current reward system, the means by which we assess candidates for tenure and promotion. And the fact is that university presses publish that scholarship: the fewer university presses, the more challenging the tenure system becomes. Additionally, the presses of land-grant universities, such as Missouri’s, have come to assume the role of repositories of the…

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On Monday, as Peter Schmidt noted in the Chronicle, the University of Texas at Austin filed its brief with the U.S. Supreme Court defending the use of racial preferences in admissions. Like the brief of the petitioner, Abigail Fisher, the UT Austin argument is pitched directly at the likely swing vote on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy. I doubt it will be persuasive.

UT Austin faces an uphill battle because the Supreme Court has long held that race can be used to promote diversity in higher education only if it is “necessary”; Kennedy has emphasized that race should be used as a “last resort,” where race-neutral means won’t suffice. For years, supporters of affirmative action argued that no workable alternatives existed for creating racial diversity. In the words of Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion in the 1978 Bakke case: “I suspect that it would be impossible…

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There are two persons of radically different political perspectives whose single-minded devotion to gathering and disseminating data on higher education set them apart from the rest of us: Tom Mortenson of Post Secondary Higher Education Opportunity, and Harry Stilles, of the Higher Education Research/Policy Center. Tom is a self-described “Minnesota socialist” dedicated to improving higher-education access, while Harry is a decidedly more conservative retired professor and legislator from South Carolina dedicated to increasing efficiency and improving quality. Higher education benefits from having both of them gather and publish data.

Today, I want to talk about some recent data published by Harry. Harry has come up with a way of measuring by state the degree of admissions selectivity. He looks at the percentage of students ranking in the top 10 percent of their high-school class,…

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The Gainesville Sun broke a story on July 19 that has potentially significant implications for postsecondary instructors across the country. The story concerned a lawsuit brought by Darnell Rhea, an adjunct instructor at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Fla., who claimed that his contract was not renewed because a student filed a complaint against him. The e-mail “complains of Rhea’s classroom behavior, his humiliating remarks to students, and his unorthodox teaching methodologies.” Rhea simply argued in his lawsuit that he wanted an opportunity to defend himself, but couldn’t because he didn’t know the identity of his accuser, yet the circuit court dismissed his case.


The First District Court of Appeal, however, reversed the dismissal, ruling “that when a student submits a complaint against a postsecondary instructor, the student’s name is public record.” Santa Fe College…

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Sen. Tom Harkin has issued his final report on for-profit higher education, a book-length indictment of one-tenth of American higher education, the for-profit sector. Obviously I have not had an opportunity yet to read the full report (I’ve been traveling for the past week or so), but from news reports alone, I see huge problems with it, much of it related to either an ignorance or contempt for how the capitalistic system of free enterprise does a very good job of delivering the goods—lots of them—in America. It is market-incentivized ingenuity and enterprise that leads millions every decade to migrate here to enjoy the fruits of the labor of American capitalism.

To be sure, the report concedes that for-profit education is here to stay, and even acknowledges that several providers (e.g., Strayer Education) have done a relatively good job, and others are at least making some…

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